Partition Resize Software Needed

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-02-16 01:32pm

I'm resizing my NTFS Windows XP partition so I can give SUSE 10 decent room on my main IDE drive without using just my SCSI drive via USB. Does anyone have any good recommendations on free partition resizers for Windows? Yes, it's Home Edition, so no fancy tools here, but then that is why I'm finally going from testing Linux to booting that as my primary OS now.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-02-16 01:44pm

There is no such thing as a resizing or moving tool for NTFS which is reliable. You can make NTFS grow (a built in tool with some serious limitations). Partition Magic (a comerically avaliable partition resizer) is often called Partition Tragic for a damn good reason.

The closest thing is using imaging software to back the partition up and slap it back down to a different location.

Seriously, just get a cheap 2nd hand harddrive. Or a cheap new harddrive.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2006-02-16 01:47pm

Or if the disk was prepartitioned as a dynamic disk, then XP supports on the fly diskresize.

But I have never seen it in real life, only read about it.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-02-16 01:53pm

I've heard horror stories from Partition Magic users, or former users I should say. I did find that you can "enlarge" the Windows partition, but since it pretty much eats my whole main drive, it's a tad useless.

I guess I can consider just using the USB HDD I have, but I tend to use that as a back-up.

It takes about 10 gigs to install all of SUSE 10 (eval. DVD ISO), so long as the swap partition is there, I can just use the external USB drive for anything else, right?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2006-02-16 07:28pm

There is NTFS Resize and I have used it ... but, as always, be very careful. You will likely need to defragment your computer and possible take out the swapfile in the process to clear up enough space at the tail of the NTFS partition.

However, the last time I did so, Windows' boot process flipped out and demanded a complete, total and thorough check on the filesystem and apparently did some voodoo to every file and directory there was, which took awhile - but I could not detect data loss.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-02-16 07:40pm

I have Knoppix v4.0 on DVD here and I came across numerous sites talking about such procedures. I'm contemplating just buggering it and going with the USB hard disk option instead, at least it means I have an OS I can take with me that isn't a live CD.

I'm really not in the mood for Windows throwing a wobbly at me over trimming its monopoly on my IDE drive by a few extra gigs to give me room, but I'll see how it goes backing my essential stuff up on DVD-R, which is taking ages.

TheBlackCat · Post by **TheBlackCat** » 2006-02-19 12:18am

I used qtparted from knoppix and had no problem. I defraged and backed up first, of course, but nothing went wrong. I split it into 3 segments, a NTFS for windows software, a FAT32 for shared files, and a blank space for my FC3 install. It worked like a charm.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2006-02-19 12:30am

Faram wrote:Or if the disk was prepartitioned as a dynamic disk, then XP supports on the fly diskresize.

But I have never seen it in real life, only read about it.

Linux is incompatible w/ it (I think- there's an option to support it in the kernel somewhere, but I wouldn't bet on it working). Linux has something similar called LVM (which allows Windows to coexist unlike the M$ crap).

You don't strictly need a swap partition, it's just normally used for performance purposes (you can use a file, or w/ enough RAM, none at all (I've never used up my entire 1GB of RAM, except for disk cache).

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-02-19 11:49am

TheBlackCat wrote:I used qtparted from knoppix and had no problem. I defraged and backed up first, of course, but nothing went wrong. I split it into 3 segments, a NTFS for windows software, a FAT32 for shared files, and a blank space for my FC3 install. It worked like a charm.

That's what I'll be doing tonight. I've backed-up all the media taking up space on my USB drive on DVD-R and am going to use the Windows back-up utility to copy the drive image to the USB drive, then use my Knoppix v4.0 disc to use qtparted. Even if the boot cylinder is corrupted, I just have to reinstall Windows then use the back-up image for restoration.